Golden Years Page 3

  We found two seats together on the Tupelov. I ignored the swarm of already intoxicated comrades, even when they were still standing as the plane took off. Let them kill themselves if they want.

  “Take a nap, Chucky dear,” she said in the maternal tone usually reserved for Siobhan Marie, our five-year-old. “We’ll be in Shannon soon and that’s the next neighborhood over.”

  I withdrew into myself and pretended that the routine chaos of an Aeroflot flight didn’t exist. Inside myself I found intolerable grief. I sighed deeply with the pain of it. My wife took my hand. She knew that I was suffering from more than my usual travel ennui.

  There had been moments of grief previously in my life. I had thought I would lose Rosemarie when I ordered her to seek psychiatric help for her alcoholism. Our two elder children were missing in action during the Vietnam era. Yet, as I knew in my heart of hearts, Rosemarie Clancy was merely waiting for me to, as the song says, lower the boom. I also knew that Kevin Patrick and April Rosemary would reappear, even if at times my faith wavered. The pain was different this time. My loss was permanent, definitive. I would never see my father again, not in this world. I felt like someone had hit me over the head with a hammer, kicked me in the stomach, and stabbed me in the back. All at the same time. My organism, body and soul, had been savaged, violated, crushed. Grief pressed me down, impeded my breathing, tore at my intestines. How long would it last? Probably forever. Even at eighty my father had mourned for his father.

  Guilt tormented me. I should have been home for my father’s death. I should have been kinder to him during his life. I thought that because I saved him from death in New Guinea when the army was about to ship him there, I had done enough. My whole career was an oedipal rival with his. He was a Cubs fan. I was a Sox fan. He was a Bears fan. I was a Cardinals fan. He was a painter who earned his living as an architect. I became an internationally known photographer who earned his living by taking pictures. All right, at the end of his life his paintings became fashionable. The Worcester Gallery had mounted an exhibit of his work, built around his brilliant Rom Women. The retrospective had toured the country, appearing even at the Art Institute and the catalogue, turned coffee-table book, was a great success. John E. O’Malley: Artist of His Times. I’m sure he knew that I was behind the scenes, just as I was when I visited the home of the local congressman in our parish at Christmastime in 1941 and explained why it would be a grave mistake to send him to New Guinea. He knew that I had orchestrated his artistic success and that must have dimmed his joy. His son had done again something that he could not do.

  Except such thoughts were an injustice to him. I may have been his rival, but he was never mine. He bragged to his friends that Chucky did a wonderful job on the art exhibit. And his wife, the Good April, would protest, “Chucky should never have let them use that picture of me.”

  The painting was a chaste, mildly erotic, and appealing portrait entitled Nude Flapper. The Good April insisted that he had painted it “after we were married … Well, almost.”

  I laughed. The pas de deux of the genders is different in every marriage. My parents’ dance was light comedy, the Charleston from their era.

  “Do you think Vangie resented my success?” I whispered to Rosemarie.

  “What?” she asked.

  The rattling of the Tupelov and the drunken carousing of its passengers had drowned out my voice. I asked the question again.

  “Go back to sleep, Chucky dear, and don’t torment yourself with silly ideas.”

  We were the Crazy O’Malleys in those distant days of the Great Depression, mostly because we did not take the Depression or anything else all that seriously. We were poor but we always had the best roast beef and the best sherry in our house. And the best music. Neither “Vangie” (short for his middle name “Evangelist”) nor April seemed to mind their fall from upper-middle-class prosperity into penury. They had each other, they had their kids, Dad had a job (architect for the Chicago Sanitary District) and life was good. They viewed poverty as a passing phase in their life. “Our ship will come in” was their mantra. I dismissed this easy optimism as foolish.

  Only the ship did come in, a very big ship. I went off to Europe in the Army of Occupation in 1946 because I figured that the family didn’t have enough money to pay college tuition. When I came home in 1948, we were rich, though Vangie and April (now driving a “cute little white Olds convertible) no more thought of themselves as “rich” than they had as “poor” ten years before.

  Unlike my father, I resented our poverty and their, as I saw it, shiftless living. I feared the return of the Great Depression long after my economics training had taught that my fear was absurd. Only at my fiftieth birthday celebration did I officially admit that the Great Depression would probably not return.

  I admired Vangie enormously. As the years passed I had come to respect his talent. I realized that his “laid-back” approach to life was the way we all should live. Admirandus sed non imitandus as one of the Dominican Fathers at Fenwick High School taught us when discussing the great penances of the saints. I was ambitious, pushy, determined to succeed—as an accountant, of course, not as picture taker. That was too easy. I would become a commodity trader, the king of the corn pit, a calling at which I was a flop. Then when I had tasted success as a picture taker, I pushed that new role into which the women in my life had pushed me with fanatic determination, even if the work was in fact mostly effortless. Dad must have smiled at my frantic efforts.

  I used to say that I was the white sheep of the Crazy O’Malleys. The only one who took life seriously.

  “You try to be serious, Chucky dear,” my mother once said, “and you almost do it, but then you become your adorable madcap self. That’s why poor, dear little Rosie is so good for you.”

  I insist that I’m neither adorable nor madcap. Rosemarie (as I insist that she be called, in vain) is certainly good for me, delicious in fact, but our marriage is a good deal more complex than April thought it would be.

  The memories were all happy, yet it was a torment to remember them. They had passed so quickly. I had wasted them. My youth was gone before I knew it and my father was now gone too. I had lost him before I had ever told him how much he meant to me.

  Maybe he had always known. Yet how could I be sure?

  “Remembering the old days, Chucky?” Rosemarie whispered in my ear.

  I nodded.

  “All gone.”

  “You know better than that … You were such a nasty little boy I don’t know why I started to love you when I was ten and loved you ever since.”

  “I was in love then too, so of course we had to fight. That’s the way of it.”

  “You looked at me so intensely. You just wanted to take my clothes off.”

  “Some things haven’t changed.”

  “Well, you’re getting better at it!”

  I remembered that when my parents discussed whether we would permit Rosemarie to adopt our family, April had some doubts. Would it be good for our children? Would she be as unstable as her mother? They were scruples for the record, not doubts which would change her mind. Dad had laughed. “What difference does one more make?”

  Now he was gone and I had yet to learn the lesson of his nonchalant cheerfulness. I never would. That contentious, obnoxious little girl spent only nighttime in her palatial house (or so it seemed) a half block away. She wormed her way into our lives and assumed direction and control of mine. Were there any other fathers in the parish who would have tolerated the daughter of a drunk and a crook?

  Not very likely.

  Then my anguished mind returned to the delights of the night before. The month-long haul through rural Russia would not have been conducive to sex even if were not deep into my travel-lag slump. Passion returned quickly enough when I beheld my wife in the (kind of) modest dinner gown she had worn to the embassy dinner. Thirty years together and she could still melt me. She was a good enough lay, as I always told her. In fact, I would c
oncede grudgingly that she had improved through the years.

  I had absorbed from my father an attitude toward women that had helped me through the ups and downs of marriage and the cycles of lovemaking. He had always treated the Good April with the reverence and respect that was appropriate for an archduchess. I knew no other way of dealing with women. If as Rosemarie occasionally said, I treated her like a subject of delicate delight, the reason was that I was merely imitating my father.

  “How does the wise man eat a big dish of chocolate ice cream?” I would ask my sons when I began to discuss the subject of women with them. “Does not one gobble it down as if there would never again be such a dish?”

  Each of them, separately of course, was sensible enough to reply with some version. “That’s no way you gulp down ice cream, Dad. You destroy it. Our generation is more civilized. We eat it very slowly, savoring every taste, enjoying every moment.”

  “So it must be,” I would say, “when you make love with a woman.”

  “A woman is like chocolate ice cream?”

  “Only sweeter and more fun.”

  That would stop them.

  And now the man who had initiated me (implicitly and doubtless unconsciously) into the pleasures of married love was gone. Forever. Or at least till we met again somewhere else. Wherever that might be.

  My imagination returned to the body of my wife in the heat of sexual arousal. We had exorcised death for a few precious moments the night before. Was death or sexual ecstasy—not unrelated events—the stronger promise? A question of some import. I squeezed my wife’s hand. She put her arm around me. No matter how mired in grief and exhaustion I might be we would defy death in our own bed tonight.

  I banished my erotic fantasies and returned to the serious business of grief. April, whose health was dubious, would soon follow her husband home, if it is to home that the dead go. Her blood pressure had been high for years. She took her medication regularly only because Dad reminded her. Someone from the family would have to move into the house. Ms. Take Charge, who had a year left at Rosary? How would we keep her out? She was something of an archduchess too.

  My mother had her music and her grandchildren and her great-grandchildren. Yet Vangie had been her life since her flapper days at Twin Lakes in the 1920s. She would want to be with him again. More grief.

  Would she be a beautiful flapper again in the world to come? Would she and Vangie be young lovers again? Would he no longer be bald?

  I figured that if God couldn’t work out something like that then he wasn’t really God.

  “You were wonderful last night,” I said to my wife.

  “You were fun too, Chucky Ducky. It was a very unromantic trip.”

  “Sorry. I should never travel any farther than Grand Beach.”

  “Not even to Notre Dame games?”

  I had been thrown out of Notre Dame on a setup thirty years before. I had no love for the school. However, blood tells and I still wanted them to win.

  “Only with an overnight at Grand Beach.”

  We both laughed and snuggled closer, though the seats on an Aeroflot Tupelov were not conducive to such behavior. We both knew that I would travel again. It went with my job. After my disastrous trip (both motion sickness and jet lag) with Ike to Korea in 1952, I swore that I would never travel again and repeated the oath after each trip. I had violated it every time.

  “Is sex or death a better symbol of the meaning of human life?” I asked her.

  “What do you think?”

  “If death is, God doesn’t know what He’s doing.”

  We laughed again. Both of us presumed that God knew what He was doing.

  I began to sneeze.

  “Not another cold, Chuck?” A mother impatient with an unruly child who had once again succumbed to a virus which would make her life difficult because the child was a very poor patient.

  “No way,” I pleaded. “Anyway, it’s what results from flying Aeroflot.”

  “The incubation period is twenty-four hours as you know very well, Chucky. You probably picked it up at the embassy last night.”

  Guilty as charged.

  “We’ll never make it to Shannon in time,” I groaned, glancing at my watch. “We’ll be marooned in a peat bog in West Clare when we should be home organizing things.”

  A cloud layer covered Europe. Aeroflot pilots never tell you where the flight is or how long it will take. You know that they’re about to land only when they put the plane into a steep dive.

  “I’m sure Ms. Take Charge will have everything organized when we get there.”

  This was a routine exchange on our travels. I would express a worry and Rosemarie would smother it with a curt response. Naturally she was usually right. Not always.

  Why does the Soviet national airline land at an Irish airport? Their airline industry had proved incapable of producing a plane that could fly nonstop to the Western Hemisphere. So Aeroflot had to touch down at the outer edge of Europe to refuel for flights to the United State and to Cuba. The Irish, who have a wonderful indifference to where any money comes from, were only too willing to sell them landing rights and fuel and to permit them to rampage through the duty-free store—under the watchful eyes of a large group of Garda.

  It was alleged by Uncle Vince (husband of my sister Peg, a lifelong ally of Rosemarie in all ventures to keep me in my place and my friend for the same period of time) that passenger agents of Aer Lingus would meet us at disembarkation and transfer us with the magic of the Irish fairie to their flight to Chicago. I didn’t believe a word of it. The real Irish, I had always argued, are a people genetically programmed to hospitality, but not necessarily to efficiency. To escape to our nighttime rest in the Clare peat bog we would have to overcome many bureaucrat obstacles. We might end up barred from Ireland, Russia, and the United States.

  And meself, as the Irish would say, with a diplomatic passport.

  As we tried foolishly to push ourselves off the plane ahead of the Russians, who were world champs at shoving on airplanes, I repeated my concern to Rosemarie, “We might end up barred from Ireland, Russia, and the United States.”

  “Our own people wouldn’t do that to us,” she replied firmly, without specifying which country was ours.

  In the noisy anarchy of the lounge, a phalanx of green-clad Aer Lingus agents labored to channel the pushing Russians into an orderly line to the duty-free store and passed out brochures in Russian, which many of the potential customers simply crumpled up and threw away. None of the green folk seemed interested in us.

  Finally, two young men appeared on the scene, glanced around for a minute, caught our eye, and smiled.

  “’Tis easy to recognize two of our own,” the youngster with the curly hair informed us.

  “And himself a leprechaun with red hair.”

  “Welcome to Ireland, Ambassador and Mrs. O’Malley.”

  “Would you ever have your baggage tickets?”

  “Ah very, good. The Ruskies are supposed to off-load them here. Seamus would you ever make sure they do.”

  “Righto, Sean.”

  “We have a son,” my wife informed them, “named Sean Seamus.”

  They both laughed as if that were the greatest joke they ever heard.

  Sean unlocked a door outside of the lounge, led us down a stairway and up another one. At the head of the stairs was a broadly grinning official of the US Immigration Service.

  “Do you have your customs declaration and your passport, Ambassador?” He asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Here they are, officer.” Rosemarie handed over the documents. “My husband doesn’t travel very well.”

  “’Tis true,” I admitted, putting on my Irish face.

  He stamped the documents and gave them back to me wife.

  “You won’t have to clear immigration at O’Hare, ma’am. I don’t imagine customs will trouble you.”

  “Just down here, ma’am.” Sean led us down another stairway and out o
n the tarmac, where a Volkswagen, painted green of course, waited for us.

  “Get in the back, Chucky,” I was told.

  I crawled in. A woman as exquisitely dressed as Rosemarie should not risk rumpling her clothes in the backseat. In the distance, halfway to Galway I estimated, was a green 747.

  “Is that our plane?” I grumbled.

  “’Tis,” Sean said over the whine of the VW engine. “It won’t leave for another half hour. We should have no trouble at all, at all, in claiming your luggage.”

  The Irish, I had learned, were not bound to tell the absolute truth. There was a tendency to tell you what they think you wanted to hear. I abandoned hope of recovering our luggage.

  “You’d think, Mrs. O’Malley,” I said, “that the national color of Ireland was green, wouldn’t you?”

  “Isn’t it?” she said, having long ago learned to play the straight person for me when I was showing off.

  “What color is it, Ambassador?” Sean asked as we careened toward the 747.

  “The national colors of Ireland,” I proclaimed, in a tone that the Supreme Pontiff might use in making an infallible statement, “are saffron and blue.”

  “Not many of your Yanks know that,” Sean admitted.

  “Irish-Americans,” I corrected him. “A Yank is either a player on a hated New York baseball team or a Protestant American.”

  Sean and my wife favored me with a laugh.

  We were led upstairs into the plane and into the deserted first-class section.

  “Come back soon,” Sean said in farewell.

  “We certainly will,” Rosemarie agreed.

  “’Tis a more efficient country than Russia,” I admitted.

  A blond cabin attendant asked whether we’d like something to drink before we took off. Rosemarie settled for a cup of tea.

  “Would you ever have a drop of Jameson’s?”

  “Special reserve, is it, sir?” she grinned.

  “’Tis very dear these days, is it not?”

  “’Tis complimentary in first class.”

  “Beats vodka.” I sighed, as the Irish do. “A double please.”

  “On the rocks?”